The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

"Three Nine Mike, you are cleared for takeoff, please expedite. Aircraft on final approach."

"Mike, Roger," I said. I reached across the company president to check her door latched and locked. "Ready?" I said.

"Yes," she said, looking straight ahead.

The Meyers' purr swept into a three-hundred horsepower wall of sound. We were pressed back into our seats as the airplane surged down the runway, already changing from asphalt and painted lines into a long blur, into Santa Monica falling away.

I moved the landing-gear lever to the UP position.

"The wheels are coming up now," I said to Leslie, "and now, the flaps ... see them retract into the wing? Now we'll come back to climb power and it will get a little quieter in here. ..." I spun the throttle down a few turns, then the propeller pitch knob, then the mixture control to bring the exhaust-gas temperature up where it belonged.

Three red lights were glowing on the panel ... the wheels were streamlined out of the way, up and locked. Gear lever to neutral, to shut off the hydraulic pump. The airplane settled into her climb, going up something less than a thousand feet per minute. She did not climb like the T-33, but then she wasn't burning six hundred gallons per hour, either.

Shoreline moved below, hundreds of people on the beach. If the engine fails now, I thought, we've got enough altitude to turn back and land on the golf course, or now, back on the runway itself. We swung into a wide turn up over the airport, then locked onto the first heading for San Diego. That heading took us over Los Angeles International Airport, and Leslie pointed to a sparse line of jetliners on final approach to land.

"Are we in their way?"

"Nope," I said. "There's a corridor over the airport; we're in it now. Safest place for us to be is right over the runways, 'cause all the big jets come in from one side to land, they go out the other side to take off, see that? 'String of pearls,' the controllers call them. At night they're a string of diamonds, with their lights on."

I eased the power down to cruise, the engine going quieter still. She asked questions with her eyes when I changed things in the airplane, and I told her what was going on.

"Now we're all leveled off. See the airspeed needle moving? That will come up to right about here; it'll show about a hundred and ninety miles per hour. This dial is our altitude. The little hand shows thousands; the big one shows hundreds. What's our altitude?"

"Three thousand ... five hundred?"

"Tell me without the question mark."

She leaned against me to see the altimeter straight-on. "Three thousand five hundred."

"Right!"

A Cessna 182 flew toward us in the corridor, a thousand feet above our altitude. "See there? She's flying at four thousand five hundred feet, going in the opposite direction. There are rules we follow to keep us from flying too close together. Even so, any airplane you see, even if you know I see it too, point it out to me. We always want to look around, see and be seen. We have strobe-lights on the tip of the tail and on the belly, to help other airplanes see us."

She nodded, looked for other airplanes. The air was smooth as a lake of cream-except for the hum of the engine, we could have been flying a low-speed space capsule in a pass along planet Earth. I reached down and adjusted the trim knob on the instrument panel. The faster the airplane flew, the more it wanted to be trimmed nose-down, else it would climb.

"Do you want to fly it?"

She edged away, as if she thought I was going to hand her the engine. "No thank you, wookie. I don't know how."

"The airplane flies itself. The pilot just shows it where to go. Gently, gently. Put your hand on the control wheel in front of you. Real lightly. Just a thumb and two fingers. That's OK. I promise I won't let you do anything bad."

She put her fingers gingerly on the wheel, as though it were a steel trap set to gnash her hand.

"All you do is press down, ever so soft, on the right side of the wheel."

She looked at me, questions.

"Go on. Believe me, the airplane loves it! Give it a little pressure on the right."

The wheel moved half an inch under her touch, and of course the Meyers tilted slowly right, starting to turn. She caught her breath.

"Now press down on the left side of the wheel." She did, as though she were performing an experiment in physics whose outcome was entirely unknown. The wings leveled, and she gave me a smile of delighted discovery.

"Now try pulling back, half an inch, on the wheel. . . ."

By the time the airport at San Diego rose on the horizon, she had finished her first flying lesson, pointed out airplanes the size of dust-particles, fifteen miles away. Her eyes were as sharp as they were beautiful; she was a pleasure to have alongside as we flew.

"You'll be a good pilot, if you ever want to take it up. You're gentle with the airplane. Most people first time, you say be gentle and they wind up clutching the controls way too tight and the poor plane starts bobbling and lurching ... if I were an airplane, I'd love for you to fly me."